Rafinesque Charles Boewe Filson Club

The Kentucky Review Volume 7 | Number 3 Article 4 Fall 1987 The alF l From Grace of That "Base Wretch" Rafinesque Charles Boewe Filson Club Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the United States History Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Boewe, Charles (1987) "The alF l From Grace of That "Base Wretch" Rafinesque," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 7 : No. 3 , Article 4. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol7/iss3/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Fall From Grace of tt That "Base Wretch" Rafinesque Charles Boewe ll. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840) is known in Kentucky because of his short and stormy professorship at Transylvania University, 1819-1826, during its period of greatness under the presidency of the Rev. Horace Holley. Better remembered for his eccentricities than for his lasting accomplishments-largely because of a colorful account by his friend Audubon1-he continues to { elicit popular interest as a square peg in a round hole.2 The events s of his life are known almost entirely from A Life of Travels, the short autobiography he published in Philadelphia, at his own expense, in 1836. Like other autobiographies, this slim volume must be treated with a degree of skepticism wherever its events are not corroborated by the accounts of others. As few parallels by contemporaries have appeared, the story of Rafinesque, over the years, has taken on several mythical dimensions. Two views of Rafinesque's life are antithetically opposed, which leads to the conclusion that both spring from information that is te subject to different interpretations. The only American naturalist "who might clearly be called a titan, "3 Rafinesque was the "greatest field botanist of his time,"4 who "had outlined the 5 rudiments of a hypothesis of Evolution by the year 1835" ; but, scorned by his dull-witted contemporaries, he "died in a lonely, miserable garret, "6 and only now is truly appreciated- by whatever writer has most recently rediscovered him. The other view is that he was an irascible and egotistical rascal-quite possibly insane-whose ill-digested knowledge and slipshod work methods produced a body of writings hard to lay hands on and best forgotten. Today Rafinesque occupies a small but secure place in the history of science, not because of his theoretical contributions to biology, which were minimal, but because of his many pioneering forays through most branches of natural history which resulted in validly published scientific names for plants and animals that cannot be ignored according to the accepted rules for 39 BOEWE nomenclature. Brief accounts of his career-as always, based on the inadequate autobiography-appear in such standard reference works as the Dictionary of American Biography, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, and Biographical Dictionary of American Science . In 1984, he finally was listed among the immortals in the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopedique Larousse. As recently as 1950, however, an attempt was made at the Seventh International Botanical Congress in Stockholm to effectually declare Rafinesque a nonperson whose published botanical discoveries should be expunged from the record. This unusual international intrigue began when the British botanist C. A . Weatherby wrote, in 1935, that the plant genera established in all of Rafinesque's later books represented "a kind of pseudo scientific work, the nomenclatural results of which may well be legislated out of existence"7 by other botanists. As indeed it lay within their power to do. Over the years since Rafinesque flourished, the world's botanists had legislated for themselves an elaborate International Code of Botanical Nomenclature which requires that the first-used Latin name for a plant, if validly F published as defined by the Code (as most of Rafinesque's were), E stand forever. The only exception occurs if the plant itself is reclassified. The "Rafinesque problem" in the history of science hinges on the issue of priority. Any of us can appreciate the natural human desire to receive credit for one's own discoveries, but by the middle of the twentieth century the principle of priority had come to have an additional function in the life sciences, especially in botanical nomenclature. Knowledge in the physical sciences is said to cumulate, but knowledge in the life sciences-especially the naming of new plants-tends to accumulate, with the result that chaos would ensue if the same plant were known by two or more scientific names. Priority of valid publication seemed to be an objective, impersonal, automatic device to purge the record of needless redundancy. 8 il The definition of such a principle had developed over time. It tl began with Linnaeus, whose rationalist eighteenth-century vision 0 gave us the binomial system itself, where every entity is assigned a first to a genus to express its affiliation with similar beings, then defined within the genus by a specific epithet to express its unique c difference, both terms being written in Latin. While various s individual naturalists published their opinions on priority from n 40 THE KENTUCKY REVIEW time to time, accepted order finally was attained through democratic means in a series of international congresses, both for botanists and zoologists. Those for botany began with one in Paris in 1867, followed by one in Vienna in 1905, then Cambridge in 1930, and so on-each resulting in a published Code bearing its name. But when Rafinesque was publishing his discoveries, priority was much more a personal matter of what one could persuade-or even coerce-his colleagues to accept. He demanded-virtually challenged9-other botanists to search out his own published plant names, however obscure the source, and taunted them when they failed to succeed. It took eleven packed pages for him to review Frederick Pursh's Flora Americae Septentrionalis (1814), where he cited chapter and verse of all the publications by Rafinesque that Pursh had overlooked, including Florula Missourica, which nobody then, or since, has ever seen.10 At the same time it must be admitted that Rafinesque was a formidable bibliographer himself, for with primitive resources at his disposal he cited and used publications which hardly can be identified today .11 Neither his erudition nor his edgy temperament have endeared him to others. The attempt to follow up on Weatherby's stern suggestion that Rafinesque's writings deserved to be outlawed was spearheaded by the Latin American botanist Leon Croizat, who published in Italy an expose titled "Rafinesque: A Concrete Case"12 and circulated the article internationally, though Croizat weaseled a bit by publishing under the pseudonym "Henricus Quatre." One supposes he had in mind, not the first Bourbon but rather, Henry IV of England, who d solved the problem of heretics by calmly burning them-for Croizat's intemperate conclusion (p. 18) was that Rafinesque's plant names had been a "flood of polluted nomenclature contributed by a lunatic, who wrote botany because he was of unsound mind." Although it had not occurred to the botanical legislators to include sanity of the author as a condition for valid publication, the question of madness has dogged Rafinesque from his lifetime onward. He acknowledged that he suffered himself to be "laughed at as a mad Botanist" in his rambles around Kentucky, in order "to be a pioneer of science."13 By the middle of the twentieth e century it was enough of an issue in botany that one of his staunchest defenders requested a posthumous psychoanalysis of the naturalist by the Boston psychiatrist J. M. Woodall. Doctor 41 BOEWE Woodall, after examining the published writing of his long-dead sj patient, pleased some people by his conclusion that Rafinesque was rr indeed sane, and went on to declare him clearly a genius; but he bJ typed Rafinesque's personality as paranoid, and diagnosed his ego re as "enlarged and hypertrophied to an abnormal degree."14 1 Perhaps because paranoid egotists occur as frequently among ac botanists as in other professions, the question of whether a crazy ef scientist can produce sane science was never settled at Stockholm. bJ Calmer heads prevailed, and Rafinesque's writings were not cc outlawed. One of his principal distinctions therefore survived: that ol he published more Latin plant names than anyone else who ever m lived-not excluding Linnaeus, the Father of Botany-though only aJ a fraction of these had entered the records accepted by all D botanists. The name Rafinesque remains a thorn in the side for many taxonomists today. dE Yet the brouhaha at Stockholm was a practical though clumsy OJ response to a very real problem. Many of Rafinesque's discoveries cr had been self-published in such limited editions that the books to were available only in a few rare book libraries, 15 and others had w been published in such obscure media, including rare Kentucky w imprints, 16 that they simply were no longer available to those who w needed to see them, especially in Europe. A few, it now seems ps likely, have disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving pa a trace. The converse of the problem plagued Rafinesque during tli his lifetime. Publishing where and when he could in Kentucky pii (earlier in New York; later in Philadelphia), he also shipped many of his best articles down the Ohio, through the port of New w; Orleans and across the Atlantic, to find publication, in the French he language, in Brussels and Paris.

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